My knee continues to heal. I'm guessing by Monday, it should be pretty much back to normal but tending to it has put me behind on a few things…ergo, we have the soup can alerting you to a reduced rate of blogging for the day.

The New York Times really liked that televised production of Peter Pan but my pal Robert J. Elisberg did not. My views are closer to Bob's but I don't feel particularly strong about it.

At least Bob was respectful of the effort. I'm saddened by some of the nastiness voiced by those who thought it was not good. Talented people made an honest attempt to do something wonderful and they succeeded wildly in the eyes of many, and succeeded somewhat in the views of others. I am amazed how upset and insulting some people get when they encounter a TV show or a movie or anything that doesn't strike them as wonderful. It's not like we're starved for media in this country. You can go watch something else you will like.

By the way: If you missed it, NBC is rerunning Peter Pan Live! on Saturday, December 13 when kids can stay up later. I hope the network has the decency to retitle it Peter Pan Not Live! Once again, it will probably have more Walmart commercials than there are Walmarts.

In other news: I was kinda joking when I asked how long it would be before Bill Cosby had his doctorate revoked. My ol' pal Bruce Reznick wrote to remind me that Cosby earned a PhD in education from the University of Massachusetts. As Bruce noted, "They don't take those away, unless there is evidence of plagiarism or fraud in the process of the degree." Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan and it was apparently never revoked.

(By the way, did I ever mention that at the time of his Unabombing, mail from Mr. Kaczynski turned up in my mailbox? He wasn't writing to me and his correspondence contained no explosives. But I was then sharing my P.O. box with the lovely actress Jewel Shepard and she was getting honest-to-God fan mail from the guy! She was not worried nor was he the creepiest guy writing to her.)

I'll be back later today if there's Breaking News. Otherwise, I'll see you Sunday.

Well, on the web actually. Joe Stuber has a great comics-oriented website called Comic Book Central and it's full of podcasts interviewing interesting people in and around the world of comics. As of today, it's fuller because he's posted one with me. It runs a little over an hour and I mostly talk about my experiences in the world of teevee but there's some stuff in there about comics.

You can find it on this page. And while you're looking for mine there, check out the one from a few weeks back with my pal Judy Strangis. Judy is a wonderful actress who you'll recognize from dozens of TV shows and commercials and other appearances.

This is the opening of the 1976 Academy Awards featuring an elaborate opening number with Ray Bolger who was 64 years old at the time [The hell he was!] and still a pretty good dancer. The first part of it was pre-taped a day or two before and then there comes a point — you'll spot it easily — when they switch to a live performance in the auditorium.

It was during this that a small but noticeable error occurred. As you may know, the Director of a show like this is in a booth somewhere watching a bank of monitors that show what each camera is seeing and he (or she) decides which view to show the home audience. Next to the Director is a person who usually has the title of Technical Director who sits before a bank of buttons and punches the one the Director specifies. So the Director calls, "Camera 3, take" and the T.D. punches the button for Camera 3 and then the Director says, "Camera 8, take" and the T.D. punches the button with the "8" on it. And so on.

Now, if you touch-type, you've probably had the experience of typing with your fingers "one off." That is, you had your hands in the wrong position so when your fingers went down to hit an "S," they actually hit an "A" and every other key was off one and you typed some gibberish before you realized it. Well, that's what reportedly happened to the T.D. during this number.

As the story is told, the Director — I think it was the legendary Marty Pasetta but I'm too lazy to look it up right now — was very enthusiastic, waving his arms as he called out shots. He accidentally bumped the T.D., knocking that person's hands off the "keyboard" for a second. When the T.D. put his hands back in place, he was one off. So there's a point in the number when the Director calls for Camera 4 and the T.D. punches 3 and then the Director calls for Camera 7 and gets 6 and so on.

It only lasted about twenty seconds until almost the last shot of the song and not all the "wrong" shots look wrong.  Still, when I was doing variety shows not long after this, I heard this story from everyone I encountered who worked in a control room. You'll notice when it happens…

Monday evening when I fell and found myself sitting on a curb nursing an injured knee, I actually thought to myself, "At least I'm having a better week than Bill Cosby." If you're alive and able to read this, I assume you are, too.

I keep trying to imagine a way Dr. Cosby — and how long before he loses that honor? — could climb out of his current scandal with some part of his reputation intact. The best I've been able to muster would require hard evidence of an evil Cosby Impersonator who likes to sneak into Bill's hotel rooms and offices to drug and molest women.

What I'm waiting for are a couple of real polls (i.e., not online ones) that tells us how many people out there think Cosby is guilty of the accusations. So far, the only one I've found is Rasmussen, whose polls on politics are sometimes wildly inaccurate…and anyway, it's just one poll. It said nearly half of Americans think it's likely the recent allegations of sexual assault are true and also…

42% of American Adults have a favorable impression of Cosby, including 16% who have a Very Favorable impression of him. Thirty-six percent (36%) view The Cosby Show star unfavorably, including 14% with a Very Unfavorable impression. Another 22% are not sure what they think of Cosby.

The survey, which has an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points, was conducted a week ago. Betcha Cosby's numbers have gone down a notch or two since then.

The survey also said a majority of respondents felt that it was wrong to yank reruns of The Cosby Show unless or until until he is officially charged with a crime. That's kind of a dodgy question since the show's not off because stations think he's guilty. It's off because either advertisers were withdrawing sponsorship or because the stations knew that was coming. Stations probably also didn't want to deal with the inevitable protests if they left it on but that's a secondary reason.

The primary one is that advertisers were moving their commercials to other shows. I don't blame them. There's no upside for them in continuing to support that show right now. All they can do is get people mad at them. A lot of people are real angry at Bill Cosby right now and some of them have to take it out on someone.

Ratings for Peter Pan Live! were down considerably from The Sound of Music…and viewership declined a lot last night throughout the show. That may have been a function of it airing on a school night when kids just couldn't stay up that late. Or maybe they found it as tedious in the middle as I did. I don't think this will stop networks from attempting more specials like this but if the next one drops as much…

It's interesting to see this morning how many people on the 'net saw quite a different show last night than I did. I'm wondering if Comcast subscribers got a version where Allison Williams was a lot more butch and expressive, whereas us Time-Warner Cable folks got the one where she didn't seem all that upset when she thought Wendy died, Tinker Bell was going to, Wendy went and grew up, etc. I hope Christopher Walken knew all his lines in the Comcast version.

But my friend Ken Levine liked it a lot and he is not an easy audience. Go read how he found dozens of things to fault but still gives it high marks.

I am told that if you omit all the commercials in the three-hour time slot, the show ran 2 hours and 12 minutes so that means 48 minutes of commercials. It felt like the other way around. By contrast, the last time Mary Martin did it for television, it ran in a two-hour slot with 20 minutes of commercials. The Cathy Rigby version ran one hour and 43 minutes.

I still like Rigby's best of all and I'm not trying to make a direct comparison. Rigby, after all, did it hundreds of times in front of live audiences before they ever committed it to video, whereas what we saw last night represented — what? Six weeks of rehearsals?

The DVD of Rigby's version was out of print for a while but it seems to be back, though Amazon is currently out of stock and awaiting more. No doubt, interest in the new version has caused a run on her version…and her version is six dollars. It was not videoed live. They apparently shot it repeatedly during a few performances in front of real audiences at the La Mirada Theater (its home base) one of the eighty million times it played there, then shot it some more without an audience and edited it all together. The wires were digitally removed from the video and some of Ms. Rigby's singing was redone by her to create definitive — as opposed to live — versions of key songs.

But it works really well, I think. If you have kids and you want to show them Peter Pan on TV, I'd go with that version over Martin or Williams. It's too bad you can't actually take them into a theater to see it anymore.

I thought Peter Pan Live! was quite skillfully done and while much of America was probably sitting there waiting for something to go wrong, some of us were marveling at how much went right…and how ambitious so much of it was. I thought the direction and staging and art direction and choreography were very good.

So did I love it? No. I admired the attempt but did not love it and some of the reasons were probably just ingrained in the whole idea of doing it at all. I found myself missing the presence of a live audience, and not just at the point where Peter asked everyone to clap and it saved Tinker Bell's life even though most viewers heard between zero and three people clapping. Mostly though, I found myself untransported to the Darling nursery or Neverland. I spent the whole three hours on a TV soundstage somewhere, unable to pretend the wires weren't there.

Most of all, I felt it was way too long, especially around the two-hour mark. They included, I believe, a lot of the show that stage productions have jettisoned. Then again, they had three hours to fill because, you know, Walmart had all that stuff to sell.

Allison Williams is adorable and I never for one moment thought she was a boy. Never thought she could fly, either. Cathy Rigby was visibly on wires too but she looked like she was in control, choosing where to fly and proudly showing off her amazing skill. Ms. Williams just looked like the wires were picking her up from one spot and putting her down in another. I hate to fault her performance because it took loads of guts and hard work to pull it off but Peter needs to have a boyishness and heroism that she just didn't have.

One moment really struck me: The moment when the Lost Boys tell Peter that they've killed "The Wendy Bird" at Tinker Bell's instruction. Williams showed no despair and no anger. Melissa Joan Hart showed more emotion in the Walmart commercial when she thought she was out of wrapping paper.

Okay, so let's talk Walken. I usually love him but his whole performance struck me as one of those Saturday Night Live-style sketches like, "What if Walter Matthau had been in Star Wars?" Or "What if Paul Lynde played The Elephant Man?" It was like they had someone in the cast who did a good Walken so they decided to do the unlikely comedic premise, "What if Christopher Walken played Captain Hook?" It wouldn't have differed much from what we got.

I think he really stopped being Hook for me when he started dancing. It's hard for Captain Hook to be an evil bastard when he's also a great hoofer. The monotonous delivery didn't accomplish much aside from inspiring thousands of Tweets saying he needed More Cowbell.

Some of the songs were fine. The "Ugga Wugg" number was so much better with everyone muttering in Yiddish instead of doing faux Indian gibberish. Switching out of Sarcasm Mode, "Distant Melody" was actually pretty good, sung well by Taylor Louderman, and I liked "I Won't Grow Up" a lot and "Hook's Waltz." Okay, fine. But such moments were just too few and far-between.

Peter Pan has always been a show with a very special duty: Done right, it's a great way to introduce young kids to the concept of musical theater. I'd love to think this production will inspire another generation of playgoers but I don't think so. Oh, well. Maybe that's what Glee is for.

• There should be an Internet law that says the ad you have to sit through to view a video clip can't be longer than the video clip.

A couple weeks ago, I went to hear John Cleese in conversation with Eric Idle. I linked to a great video of that chat here.

During it, Mr. Cleese and Mr. Idle read/performed a sketch that had been written for a pre-Python projecy in which Mr. Cleese appeared, a series called At Last…the 1948 Show. Idle read a role that had originally been performed by Marty Feldman.

What we have here today is a longer version of that sketch as performed by Mr. Feldman and his foil, John Junkin, on a subsequent show of Feldman's. The character's name is Mr. Pest. For obvious reasons…

Mary McNamara will miss the Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report. So will a lot of us…but I have no reason to think that the Stephen Colbert of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert won't be a fine trade-off.

My knee and arm continue to heal. In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have posted about my little accident but when you have a blog to fill, you tend to think of everything as material. It was not as bad as some who wrote me seemed to think.

I don't have much to say about the Eric Garner matter back east other than to echo the frustration of Mr. Stewart last night on The Daily Show. Years ago when we had the Rodney King riots in L.A., I had a gentleman of color doing some construction-type work on my house. Naturally, we got to talking about the looting and burning that was going on in parts of the city following the verdict that acquitted the police officers who'd been caught on tape beating the crap out of King, long after he could not have escaped or harmed them.

The worker said to me, not that this wasn't obvious, "It just shows you the system is rigged. Even when they have videotape of these cops assaulting a black man, the cops walk." That's got to be what a lot of people are feeling today about Garner's death and also that of Michael Brown and others.

I'm trying to not write as much on this blog about serious subjects because there are so many places on the 'net where you can read about them, whereas this is one of the few places you can read about old comedians and my silly experiences and the evils of cole slaw. But as a wise man wrote very recently, when you have a blog to fill, you tend to think of everything as material. So I'm not going to dwell on Brown or Garner…and if Bill Cosby weren't a comedy legend, I probably wouldn't be writing much about him. I just have trouble at times getting my mind off injustices that are out there. I kind of hope I never learn how to do that.

My old pal Pat O'Neill wrote…

A local community theater I occasionally work with just finished a run of Peter Pan. Like the Rigby version, they dropped "Mysterious Lady" and Liza's ballet (Liza being the Darlings' maid), but kept the bit where she asks Peter to teach her to crow, leading to the reprise of "I Gotta Crow." (It looked like it's necessary to cover a scene change, actually — and I'd bet the ballet was, too.)

Their Peter was a young woman who could — had I not known the convention of a woman playing Peter — have completely convinced me she was male. It can be done.

Oh, I know it can be done. Cathy Rigby pretty much made me forget her gender for the duration of the play. I just wonder why it always has to be done. There are other theatrical versions of Peter Pan (other than the one with the score by Leigh, Charlap, Comden, Green and Styne) that cast males in the role.

The ballet with the animals may have covered a scene change in the version you saw but in the Mary Martin version, it took up the whole stage so nothing was changing. It was in there because, once upon a time, it was Standard Operating Procedure for Broadway musicals to hand one whole number over to the choreographer to show off. Most of the top choreographers demanded it even when, like Jerome Robbins in this case, the choreographer was also the director.

Broadway shows of the period usually had one even if, as in Peter Pan, it stopped the action and did not advance the story one bit. One of the best was the "Sadie Hawkins' Day Ballet" in Li'l Abner where the ballet not only advanced the story a lot but it closed the first act. I seem to recall that when My Fair Lady opened for previews, it had a ballet that was quickly cut.

I haven't heard if they've cut the ballet in the version of Peter Pan that airs tonight. They seem to want to make this show technically difficult and filled with spectacle so perhaps not. I also don't know what they're going to do about the scene where Peter asks the audience to clap to save Tinker Bell's life. There's no live audience there.

I'm still looking forward to the show but some of the publicity almost seems to be saying, "Hey, it's live! Tune in and see if anything goes wrong!" I assume that if there are any screw-ups, they won't be fixed for the West Coast feed of the show…but this is looking less and less like a musical and more like one of those "daredevil" TV specials where we tune in just to see if Evel Knievel is going to make it over the canyon or some Wallenda is going to walk the tightrope successfully.

Our pal Robert J. Elisberg (I get to call him Bob) reviews some new electronics devices that might be of use to writers. Most of 'em seem to be ways to power your laptop or other portable device.

Another audition tape for Peter Pan Live. This time, it's Jane Krakowksi. I can't wait for Whoopi's…

• How come all the people who were hysterical about Government Death Panels seem to like the idea of cops killing whoever they want?

Jon Bois writes about how terrible it is to work at RadioShack, a company which many predict will not outlive the warranties on most of the products they're now selling.

RadioShacks are closing every day and there are two obvious reasons. One is that so much of what they sell is more easily available on the Internet. You'd think that they might be able to compete by being a place where you could get wise advice on your electronics and computer purchases but that brings us to the second problem: Very few people who know anything about such areas can stand to work for RadioShack for very long. I don't know how many times I've had to explain to sales folks there what it is they're selling. I don't know that much about this stuff but I know more than any RadioShack employee I've encountered in years.